Author: Frank, PANews
On August 28, Solana's re-staking protocol Solayer completed a $12 million seed round of financing, led by Polychain Capital. Other investors included Big Brain Holdings, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, Race Capital, ABCDE, and Arthur Hayes' family office Maelstrom. Previously, Solayer also conducted a pre-seed financing round of undisclosed size, with angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. In early August, Solayer also received investment from Binance Labs.
Solaye's all-star capital lineup and Solana's re-staking narrative have attracted much attention from the community. Will Solayer become the next Solana's Eigenlayer?
Launching endogenous AVS based on Solana
There is not much public information about Solayer's entrepreneurial story and team background. It is known that Solayer has two founders, Jason Li and Rachel Chu, both veterans of the crypto industry. Jason Li previously created the non-custodial enterprise wallet project MPCVault, and Rachel Chu created the NFT creation tool platform Vibe before creating Solayer. In addition, Rachel Chu is also a core developer of SushiSwap.
From the perspective of product positioning, Solayer is equivalent to Eigenlayer on the Solana chain, and Solayer itself often uses Eigenlayer as a reference and comparison. However, due to the large differences in the design architecture of Solana and Ethereum, Solayer also has its own set of logic in the design scheme, which is described in the official documentation of Solayer: "We do not fundamentally agree with the technical architecture of EigenLayer. Therefore, we have restructured and re-standardized the re-staking in the Solana ecosystem in a sense. Re-staking is used as a way to ensure network bandwidth for applications. Our goal is to become the de facto infrastructure for stake-weighted quality of service, and ultimately become the core primitive of the Solana blockchain/consensus."
Among them, endogenous AVS has been mentioned many times as a key innovation of Solayer. It is reported that Solayer introduces a new concept in blockchain infrastructure: a system in which dApps can dynamically allocate their processing power based on the staked tokens. This staking weight-based approach enables dApps to influence network operations based on their staking ratio, thereby achieving faster and more reliable user transactions. From an interpretation point of view, the biggest difference between this endogenous AVS and Eigenlayer is that Solayer focuses more on dApps within the Solana ecosystem rather than outside. These native AVS are directly allocated by validators, so transactions are prioritized.
On August 15, Solayer announced that it had launched the first batch of endogenous AVS together with four Solana native projects, including Bonk, AltLayer, SonicSVM, and Hashkey. Since its launch in May 2024, Solayer's highest TVL has exceeded US$190 million, with approximately 100,000 independent deposit addresses, and is currently ranked fifth in the re-staking track.
The re-pledge track is cooling down, and the development is facing market challenges
The re-pledge protocol was previously a hot topic in the Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystems. Therefore, as the hottest public chain this year, the re-pledge protocol on Solana has also attracted much attention. On August 27, DWF Ventures published a long article introducing several re-pledge protocols on Solana and stated that it will continue to pay attention to the re-pledge protocol on Solana.
In addition to Solayer, Picasso, Jito, Cambrian, and Fragmetric also plan to launch re-staking protocols on Solana. At present, Solayer is the hottest project and the first Solana re-staking project to launch the mainnet.
However, the recent re-staking track has not maintained high popularity. Data on August 29 showed that the TVL of the leading project EigenLayer has fallen to US$11.7 billion, which is nearly half of the peak of US$20 billion. According to defillama data, the total TVL of the re-staking agreement in the entire network is currently about US$14 billion, and the tokens related to re-staking have also generally shown a downward trend in the past month, with a drop of more than 20%.
At present, Solayer has not announced the specific plan for its native token. Co-founder Rachel Chu said that the token is "under design". Recently, as the MEME coin craze gradually subsides, various data on Solana are in a downward range. In the future, can Solayer successfully replicate the popularity of Eigenlayer? PANews will continue to pay attention to the progress of the project.
